A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)
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29 December (watched on DVD)
A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)
94 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 15 / F : 16
S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)
Woody Allen, as we all probably know, has been in analysis. In character somewhere, he quips that his analyst was a strict Freudian, so it was only after several weeks that he realized that the analyst had retired.
It must have occurred to him that maybe things intended for the analyst could be heard by someone else, and he has used the motif more than once, both pure, and in the intercepted instructions of David Ogden Stiers as hypnotist Voltan in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (Something is also overheard in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), but not, probably, in the context of any sort of treatment.)
Yet the most prolonged handling is in Another Woman (1988), with Mia Farrow (according to IMDb, her character is called Hope : the two women discuss the Klimt painting of that name, at one point) audible to Gena Rowlands (Marion) in another apartment. Famously quoted, Burns tells us* :
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
In due course, this is what happens to Marion, so Hope is then justly called, because Marion responds for the good to what she hears about what she learns about herself when she has contrived to make something of meeting Hope and ended up having lunch with her and making some discoveries. (As in Deconstructing Harry (1997), there is a therapeutic element behind what happens in the film, but without the vivacious humour of and in outlandish circumstance.)
The new space in which Marion has gone to work on her book gives her other unexpected insights into her life, experience and developments, and it is not unlike a womb, in which she can allow fatigue to overcome her and dream, for example, of Rilke's 'The Panther', the man who introduced her to it when she was at college, and what happened between them. Likewise, she recalls the youth of her brother Paul and her, and how both how viewed himself and she did was shaped by their father's opinions.
It is only, though, in hearing what the unknowing Hope says that there is a breakthrough, when she hears herself described by someone who had been going to therapy because of her feelings, but sees how locked up Marion. Maybe, for each of them, the other is the title's 'another woman', but really Marion has that gift of being seen as Hope witnesses her. Rowlands, whose life has intensely been that of the mind and has been defensive (even, as shown, to the part of being rude, or of seducing partners' attention away to her), transforms, and we appreciate the restraint that she has been under, which she has carried off to excellent effect, such that the intellectualized put-downs and self-deception seem faultless.
Farrow is the junior role, of course, but she is vital to how Rowlands' works, and she more than brings off embodying what, for us, is much of the time just a voice, and not even a voice allowed to approach us directly, since she has to come by means of and sound as if through an air-duct. And with that duct - when Marion calls around to the therapist and seeks to find out what has happened to her - there is almost a hint, in what is said, that maybe somehow she had been permitted this insight of which Burns writes, and that her live, until now, has been lived amongst shadows...
At the time of the over-praised Midnight in Paris (2011), not least in the light of the far greater achievement in Blue Jasmine (2013), there were ludicrous claims about a return to form : here, in Another Woman, is perfectly good evidence of form for which some were claiming to look back as far as Annie Hall (1977) for, and which I should have seen again before.
End-notes
* In 'To a Louse'.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Woody Allen, as we all probably know, has been in analysis. In character somewhere, he quips that his analyst was a strict Freudian, so it was only after several weeks that he realized that the analyst had retired.
It must have occurred to him that maybe things intended for the analyst could be heard by someone else, and he has used the motif more than once, both pure, and in the intercepted instructions of David Ogden Stiers as hypnotist Voltan in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (Something is also overheard in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), but not, probably, in the context of any sort of treatment.)
Yet the most prolonged handling is in Another Woman (1988), with Mia Farrow (according to IMDb, her character is called Hope : the two women discuss the Klimt painting of that name, at one point) audible to Gena Rowlands (Marion) in another apartment. Famously quoted, Burns tells us* :
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
In due course, this is what happens to Marion, so Hope is then justly called, because Marion responds for the good to what she hears about what she learns about herself when she has contrived to make something of meeting Hope and ended up having lunch with her and making some discoveries. (As in Deconstructing Harry (1997), there is a therapeutic element behind what happens in the film, but without the vivacious humour of and in outlandish circumstance.)
The new space in which Marion has gone to work on her book gives her other unexpected insights into her life, experience and developments, and it is not unlike a womb, in which she can allow fatigue to overcome her and dream, for example, of Rilke's 'The Panther', the man who introduced her to it when she was at college, and what happened between them. Likewise, she recalls the youth of her brother Paul and her, and how both how viewed himself and she did was shaped by their father's opinions.
It is only, though, in hearing what the unknowing Hope says that there is a breakthrough, when she hears herself described by someone who had been going to therapy because of her feelings, but sees how locked up Marion. Maybe, for each of them, the other is the title's 'another woman', but really Marion has that gift of being seen as Hope witnesses her. Rowlands, whose life has intensely been that of the mind and has been defensive (even, as shown, to the part of being rude, or of seducing partners' attention away to her), transforms, and we appreciate the restraint that she has been under, which she has carried off to excellent effect, such that the intellectualized put-downs and self-deception seem faultless.
Farrow is the junior role, of course, but she is vital to how Rowlands' works, and she more than brings off embodying what, for us, is much of the time just a voice, and not even a voice allowed to approach us directly, since she has to come by means of and sound as if through an air-duct. And with that duct - when Marion calls around to the therapist and seeks to find out what has happened to her - there is almost a hint, in what is said, that maybe somehow she had been permitted this insight of which Burns writes, and that her live, until now, has been lived amongst shadows...
At the time of the over-praised Midnight in Paris (2011), not least in the light of the far greater achievement in Blue Jasmine (2013), there were ludicrous claims about a return to form : here, in Another Woman, is perfectly good evidence of form for which some were claiming to look back as far as Annie Hall (1977) for, and which I should have seen again before.
End-notes
* In 'To a Louse'.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
